CARTOONIST FITZSIMMONS DRAWS ON GUN NUTS AT TUCSON SHOWDOWN

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2000:

TUCSON––Nearly 650 animal
defenders and thousands of gun nuts converged
on September 17 at the Tucson
Convention Center. The last day of the 6th
annual No-Kill Conference had been booked,
unknown to conference organizer Lynda Foro
of Doing Things For Animals, just a glass
wall away from the first day of a weekend gun
show and rallying event for supporters of
Arizona ballot Proposition 102.
Backed by the Tucson-based Safari
Club International and the National Rifle
Association, Proposition 102 would require
that future state initiatives regarding wildlife
management must get a two-thirds majority.
As the crowds gathered, SHARK
founder Hindi and ANIMAL PEOPLE editor
Merritt Clifton strode through the lines awaiting
admission to the gun show to the NRA
membership recruiting table and delivered to
the man who seemed to be in charge a written
challenge to debate at one hour past high noon.

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HUNTING OPS STOPPED

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2000:

Under pressure from Republican
governor Christie Whitman, 26 outraged
municipalities, and the threat of a
lawsuit from the New Jersey Animal Rights
Alliance, the New Jersey Fish and Game
Council on September 11 reversed its own
June decision to open the first bear hunting
season in the state since 1972––just nine
days before it was to start. The Fish and
Game Council instead agreed to give
Whitman’s own $1 million five-point plan to
discourage nuisance bears time to work.
There were an estimated 100 bears in New
Jersey in 1972, but are now about 1,200,
who are blamed for breaking into 29 homes,
attacking 25 farm animals, and attacking
40 pets during 1999.

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Namibian sealing

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2000:

WINDHOEK– – Starting
the largest annual slaughter of
marine mammals in the southern
hemisphere in mid-August, Namibian
fisheries minister Abraham
Iyambo barred photographers from
the beaches, but couldn’t keep the
M-Net TV show Carte Blanche
from broadcasting video on October
1 of sealers killing seals in flagrant
disregard of rules which were supposed
to minimize animal suffering.

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Animal advocates in Pakistan

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2000:

MULTAN, Pakistan– – International human rights monitors consider Pakistan one of the hardest of all places to advocate for women and minorities. Animals scarcely rate public notice.

Among the major international animal protection organizations, only the British-based Brooke Hospital for Animals and World Wildlife Fund maintain a presence in Pakistan––and the four Brooke clinics deal almost exclusively with equines, while the prohunting WWF confines its concerns to wildlife.

The World Society for Animal Protection campaigns on behalf of dancing bears in Pakistan, but faxes press releases to Islamabad media from London.

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USDA agrees––finally––that rats, mice, and birds are animals

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2000:

WASHINGTON D.C. – –
U.S. District Judge Ellen S. Huvelle
on October 4 agreed to hear arguments
from Johns Hopkins University
and the National Association for
Biomedical Research against a
precedent-setting agreement under
which the USDA Animal and Plant
Health Inspection Service would settle
a lawsuit brought by the
Alternatives Research & Development
Foundation by bringing rats,
mice, and birds under the protection
of the federal Animal Welfare Act.
The proposed agreement
requires the USDA to amend the
definition of “animal” in the Animal
Welfare Act enforcement regulations
so as to remove the exclusion of rats,
mice, and birds which has been in
effect since 1970.

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Lab primates

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2000:

The Swiss drug firm
Novartis Pharma AG on September
26 reportedly merged with
Biotransplant Inc. of Massachusetts,
with which it has worked
for several years to breed pigs
with human genes, and said it
would close Imutran, a British
subsidiary which on September 21
was subject of a London Daily

Express expose of allegedly cruel
conditions and falsified data in
pig-to-primate transplant experiments.
The Daily Express expose
was based on documents leaked to
the animal advocacy group
Uncaged Campaigns.
“Effective September
5, 2000, China Airlines will not
accept live primates destined for
experimentation as cargo,” the
airline has informed the Animal
Protection Institute.

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Maddie’s update

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2000:

Maddie’s Fund on September 21
awarded a start-up grant of $61,000 to the
Lodi Pet Saving Connection, a coalition
formed to achieve no-kill animal control in
Lodi, California, by the end of 2005. The nokill
rescue group Animal Friends Connection
heads the project, which also includes L o d i
Animal Services, all eight Lodi veterinary
hospitals, and four veterinary clinics in the surrounding
area. If the coalition meets each of
the neutering and adoption goals set by agreement
with Maddie’s, it will get $500,000 over
the next five years, during which it must cut
the number of dogs and cats killed in community
shelters by about 1,500.

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ANTI-CRUELTY ENFORCEMENT, REHOMING, AND RESCUE

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2000:

“For the first time, in a country
where human rights are routinely violated,
someone has been convicted of cruelty to
an animal,” London Observer Service correspondent
Martin Dayani recently reported
from Bogota, Colombia. District Judge
Elsa Lucia Romero, of Suba, a northern
Bogota suburb, jailed two men for three
months and fined them each the value of 35
grams of gold for allegedly setting a street
dog named L u c a s on fire with a blowtorch
and then leaving him to suffer for 24 hours
with the burns that eventually killed him.
“Legally this was a watershed,” Romero told
Dayani. “What was important in this case
was that people had reported the incident. I
considered that the death of the dog caused
upset among the local residents,” who
demanded justice even though the 10-year-old
Colombian cruelty law was so obscure that
Romero had difficulty finding a copy of it.
Continued Romero, “This case appears to
have given publicity to the wide-scale abuse
of animals in our society, which is important,
as ignorance surrounding the legal rights of
animals encourages impunity.” Added animal
advocate Emiliano Castro, “Colombians will
never achieve a peaceful society based on
human dignity and respect for one another if
we can’t first learn to respect the rights of our
brothers in the animal kingdom.”

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Case vs. ALF flak dropped

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2000:

VANCOUVER, B.C.– – The
Royal Canadian Mounted Police on
September 25 withdrew charges that frequent
Animal Liberation Front spokesperson
David Barbarash, 36, and his
longtime associate Darren Todd
Thurston, 30, sent more than 20 razor
blade-rigged letters to hunters, furriers,
and a newspaper columnist.
R C M P spokespersons told
media that they remain confident that
Barbarash and Thurston were rightly
accused, but felt an order from British
Columbia Supreme Court Justice
Kenneth Lysyk to fully disclose the evidence
against them would jeopardize
confidential sources and agreements
with other law enforcement agencies to
protect the other agencies’ sources.

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